Thursday, November 15, 2012

IDF cheerily live-tweets infanticide

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but if I were the spokesman for a formidable military institution that had, just moments ago, used its sophisticated killing equipment to end the lives of several civilians, including an 11-month-old baby, I might make a point of presenting a solemn face to the world (if not indeed an embarrassed and even contrite one).

Not so the spokespeople for the Israeli army, who, after yesterday’s launch of “Operation Pillar of Defense” against Gaza, began an extraordinary Twitter campaign of self-congratulation, self-pity, and “jokes” couched in the breezy language of adolescent computer gamers besting their digital adversaries. Here is a selection of their more galling efforts:

@IDFSpokesperson: We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

@CaptainBarakRaz: #HamasBumperStickers I fired ten rockets and all I got was this lousy bumper sticker (Re-tweeted with a “LOL” by fellow official spokesperson @MajPeterLerner)

@NathanWurtzel: #HamasBumperStickers Honk If You’re About to be Taken Out by an Israeli Air to Surface Missile (Re-tweeted by @CaptainBarakRaz)

This trash is in addition to the usual bluster about “surgical” strikes and the unmatched morality and “purity” of the “Israel Defense Forces”. Surgical, like removing a sore tooth with a spade. Pure, like the Red Army memorialized by Vladimir Putin on his most recent visit to the Holy Land.

Elsewhere, it was also dispiriting to see Zionist backers of the Syrian opposition hastily trying to change the subject to Bashar al-Assad – the mirror image, in other words, of the pro-Assad “leftists” who prefer not to dwell on the crimes of the shabbiha. Hamas is certainly not the Free Syrian Army, but a dead child is a dead child. Fortunately, as has been so often the case in the past twenty months, Syrians themselves produced the finest moral clarity:

@NuffSilence: Innocent civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinians, should be a red-line. Why is this so hard to grasp?